Why are moral judgments concerned more with "fairness" than need or empathy?

Dear Dr. Meinecke,

Thank you very much for your question.

First of all, ‘altruism’ is a technical concept referring to the investiment of personal resources —food, care, or even actions like to lure a predator away from our young— in favor of others, thus diminishing our personal fitness.

However, in 1987 (On Gods, Genes, and Tyrants, Dordrecht: Reidel) I stated that under a “moral action” several levels are hidden. The psychological motive to act and the judgment about the fairness of our (or others’) act are the more conspicuous.

Jonathan Haidt (2001. The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment. Psychological Review, 108, 814-834) held that the decision on the rightness or wrongness of any action is almost instantaneous, being more delayed the justification —i.e., judgment— of the decision taken. What you call “grace” seems to be more related with the quick act, meanwhile fairness, justice and so forth belong to the delayed part of the moral action.

We have recently found the cerebral networks related with aesthetic —not moral— judgment, following a similar two-steps temporal scheme (Cela-Conde et al, 2013. Dynamics of brain networks in the aesthetic appreciation. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 110 (Supplement 2), 10454-10461. doi: www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1302855110). We are currently preparing a new experiment in which both aesthetic and ethic judgments will be carried out. My guess is that, also in the moral case, different brain networks will correspond to the ‘action’ and the ‘reflection about action’ stages.

Best,

Camilo Cela-Conde

The question you pose comes from a simple source that most forget about, but become ingrained in everyone at a very early age, which in term makes it habit. Parents and schools, at an early age, teach that it’s important to share. In beginning classrooms, mainly pre-school and kindergarten, children are told that it is important to share and be fair. If one child gets a cookie, then it’s important that the person watching get one too. If someone gets to have cake after dessert, then so should everyone else. This is why elementary teachers enforce the rule of taking turns with little kids; a rule that can be very difficult for an only-child to understand when at home they get everything they want all the time. The concept of taking turns demonstrates to children the importance of sharing scarce resources. The social and peer environment help regulate the idea of fairness. An example of this is when all the kids in a group witness another child getting to play with a toy longer than all the other kids before. The group is quick to point out the mistake and quickly bring it to the teacher’s attention. This is a concept that individuals have grown to depend on as they get older. The teacher concept grows as children do, moving from each person to another entity (i.e., teacher, principle, boss, police, judge, government, god, etc). The person in charge is meant to pass judgment on what is fair and what is not.

I remember going to school and the teacher always telling me that if I didn't bring enough for the class then I couldn't bring it in at all. The idea was to teach students that it’s more important to respect others’ feelings and fairness than one’s needs. If you view this as the beginning parts of the fairness template you can begin to understand how everything else gets built on top of it. This is why people view salary as a form of determining their appreciation in companies (hence if they are being treated fairly). If someone you know does the exact same job that you do but for more pay and has been with the company less, the concept of fairness comes into play. The schema you were given as a child tells you that you should have been given a raise as well if that other person is doing the exact same job as you. Of course, life tells you that is not how life works and life is not supposed to be about fairness at all. This is a concept that very few grasp because the idea of fairness is so strong for everyone. We all want to be treated equally and fairly, but that is never the case and never will be.

If you look at the generation of Trophy kids, kids who were given an award just for showing up and telling them that they are all winners, reinforces the idea of fairness in them. They grow up thinking that the world is all about treating everyone fairly, a very dangerous and delusional concept to teach to kids because they grow up viewing every situation as something that relates to everyone being treated fairly. When future results don’t end with fairness as an outcome, the trophy generation tends to have a hard time understanding what happened with a lot of hurt feelings. Their fairness perspective has blinded them to the realities of life. In their sense of survival, these are the people that criminals prey on because they are so gullible for pleasing and treating others with kindness and fairness.

Now if you take a look at morality, which is the difference good and bad, you can see that there is a lot of grey area that comes about from such an ambiguous term. Someone’s good might be someone else’s bad. It has a lot more elasticity then the concept of ethics, which is the different right and wrong. In ethics the boundaries are a lot clearer to navigate through. Fairness blinds someone to believe that as long as everyone gets what they want, then that is a good thing and morally just. There is a collective thought process that takes place when fairness is viewed with the intention of everyone else in mind. A moral judgment concerned instead with one’s own needs invalidates the premise of being morally just. A moral judgment concerned with empathy of others would be a better outcome, but because of our need for our own survival, we have a selfish take that if there is enough to go around, make sure you help yourself to your fair share. Morality should point you in the direction of serving the needs of other’s first but sometimes that is not always the case.

Hope that helps

Need/ empathy is just emotion/expression. Judgement leads to fairness which is one kind of behavioral action. That's why fairness is more important in case of moral judgement.

Dear Prof Cela-Conde,

I wish to thank you sincerely for taking the time to share so much detail with me. I found your article "Dynamics of brain networks in the aesthetic appreciation" immensely insightful and (amazingly) inline with my current studies. I apologize I have not gotten to the additional links you shared yet but will certainly do so (downloaded but not yet fully explored). I find your "sensu stricto" and "sensu lato" concepts meaningful and I much agree as well; we seem to struggle with a conscious dilemma of either inarticulately transiting the sensory experience of any one moment, or missing the moment in favor of articulated expression of it. Too, your study is invaluable (to me) as a tangible method to seek description of what we viscerally experience and still share it both analytically and sensorially. I look forward to your follow up study very much.

The additional material suggestions on reestablishing base potential seem to represent that the "rest state" is an anticipative baseline which must accommodate the novel affectations after their experience (if only slightly) - like an accommodation or consolidation network - does that sound correct? Thank you again, and I do think that affective anticipation of potential beauty is an inherent quality in living things - that sort of value does not like to kept hidden, so that the simple observance of it is enough for it to express its value in the observer's reaction to it.

Jesse Prinz (2011) provides an interesting response to this same question. I have provided a link to the article at the bottom of this message. In sum, he argues that empathy is neither necessary nor the best suited emotion for successful moral judgments. Steven Pinker similarly argues that empathy is over-rated as a moral emotion in his recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. One weakness of empathy that comes to mind is how it is influenced by proximity. It is far easier to feel empathy for the a starving child on my doorstep than for children on the other side of the planet. You raise an interesting questions nonetheless.

Lonny Meinecke's question reminds me of a duality I observed in experiments on the formation of expectations about alocation behavior and fairness judgments. Established fairness rules such as equity (related to deservingness) are overruled by rules that are not explicitly associated with fairness. for instance, an undeserved reward is judged as fair if it can be wiewed as a consequence of altruism (grace?). More information can be found in the papers added.

Thank you Curtis and Guido for your replies, apologies for the lateness of response. I will read these articles and reply soon...

Thanks so much Curtis, a very good article and very helpful. I often find that even very different views can expand the concept space for me, leading not so much to agreement or disagreement with the article, as they do to an opening of the scope of the problem which I have missed. If I may, here are a few new things I hope surface from Prinz’s views:

- The definition Prinz uses for “empathy” is quite different; it is very similar though, to the various definitions of “altruism” and that is very helpful for me. Many define altruism as needing substantiation, as though there are hidden reasons to justify the expenditure of value other than basic appreciation of need itself and the capacity to alleviate need (in which both find their worth). Prinz sees empathy the same way – as though empathy is a vulnerability, something to exploit, not an affective affordance. I see this quite a lot with “unexplainable” exchanges of value, which perhaps just means we often can’t see that valuation has no part in these acts. They are not exchanges, but epirrhipto in Greek – the “sudden casting away” of “excess” hope into voids of need – fulfillment is the simple reward of seeing need relieved (the medical sense).

- For me, from my research (so far), what we call empathy is an affective entanglement in another’s outcomes. Both persons “go away” and all is affect. For when we are entangled, we are inseverably part of this other’s outcome (like attachments themselves), and deservingness, worth, stories connecting us to the protagonist's plight – none of these enter in because there is simply no time for comparison or valuation.

-- Lastly, he uses the example of a "plural empathy" versus a "singular empathy", as though it is about the story of or judgment of worth of the person or group -- instead of simple attachment to the affective outcome itself which doesn’t care about numbers or justifications, since those would impede or discourage aid.

This is my question really - why do we involve "deservingness" at all, when it comes to an inseverable need? Why would we select one need's fulfillment over another, if our true goal were to alleviate suffering (pathos)? Incidental proximacy would be sufficient “reason”. We can’t “right” events in the past, really, just their conception (thinking of Kant’s reflective/aesthetic judgments here). Need is never fair, it’s just need, and suffering isn’t a thing we can weigh and subselect which to relieve and which to ignore if it's happening to us. How we see other things seems to reflect us, more than what we seek to describe. Your thoughts?

Thank you very much Guido for sharing your paper with me. I found it very meaningful, and especially liked the example of King David's overriding kindness -- which, amazingly, suggests that it is possible to provide an equitable judgment and still provide for the act of grace/altruism.The issues of self/other and 3rd person perspective remain intriguing topics to me, and this was helpful. Deservingness is such a difficult concept for me -- the idea that "need" itself, still needs "something more" to reach a fulfillment it can't go without; or the reverse, that when something goes wrong, that event "needs something more" than this sorrow we all already have. There's much for me to think about now -- thank you for sharing this.

Is it because "fairness" can be observable and measureable? And moral judgments are highly subjective; come from a person's world view?

Someone once said "All charity is self-serving. I do believe that. Does that factor into the discussion .

Thank you Janet for replying here. I do think you are right about measurability -- we are almost obsessive when it comes to being able to consensually see one stimulus/outcome from a single reliable perspective, even if we hold an infinity of perspectives (per James and many others). We are always looking for standards (weights and measures), constants (math and physics), or some unquestionable perception of a thing which remains uncertain to the degree a plural of perceivers can see it (quantum stuff e.g.). Still, it is our fashion and our tradition, as referentially anxious social creatures.

For your second reply, again thank you. I have seen this view, and must apologize that it remains a view which puzzles me. Charity which is measurable (see above) does not seem charitable to me. Or if we gain some reward or credit for self, other than feeling immeasurably fortunate to have had some little part in helping another, that is hard for me to see as charity. The need for anonymity many express, reminds us just how immeasurable a gift can be.

I do think this perception arises because we as urgent creatures need explanation for things which are quantifiably unexplainable. But perhaps that is because, subjacent to the concept of a consensual quantum of anything, there is first a subjective quale which cannot be held by two observers. Affective qualia -- like the tingles we get listening to deeply moving music, or seeing someone do some unexplainably kind act and fleeing the scene before recognition can ensue -- are neither explainable nor quantifiable. Like the widow's mite in the parable, when you give everything, one person's everything is no different than anybody else's. For me that is charity, and fairness doesn't fit here nor social exchange theory. Thank you though, apologies if I misunderstand.

Thank you for your time. You broadened my thinking, and gave me some new vocabulary "qualia" and "quale".

One more point referring to your words "we as urgent creatures need explanation for things which are quantifiably unexplainable" Explanations will emerge, Just because we don't presently have tools to explain something, (yet), doesn't mean its not there. There are measurement tools and explanations that are evolving all the time, things we cannot yet imagine.

Someone once said "Presence of absence is not absence of presence" ( I hope I got that in the right order)

Best regards,

Janet

Thank you very much Janet - I think we are in complete agreement too, that just because we lack the tools presently, doesn't mean something lacks capacity for explanation. My hope is that we will find the missing measure is our infinite diversity of perceptions. I think we are the quanta - not the things we see or how much they are worth. Each of us has some little bit of magnitude of awe of nature to contribute to the whole of our perception of it. Like you said - if we can appreciate something is missing (absent), that means it's already here in our subliminal awareness -- and we just haven't included it in our full conscious explanation. What more can we include, than everything we see a little differently? Thank you for helping me think this through a bit more Janet, much appreciated.

I think you'll like reading this:

don't bother about the name of the website. It is legitimate.

Marilynne Robinson was an invited speaker at Yale's annual Terry Lectures series

http://www.yale.edu/terrylecture/robinson.

From her book, "Absence of Mind"

In Robinson’s view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality."

Excerpt from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nphvj#

Absence of Mind

The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self

Marilynne Robinson

Publication Date: May 2010

Published by: Yale University Press

eISBN: 978-0-300-16647-7

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nphvj

Categories : Humanities - Religion

These citations are given to the best of my ability. Apologies to any one who judges they are inadequate. Please contact the writer. jdrn22@aol.com

all retrieved June12, 2014 from the internet.

Keep searching, interesting reference to Phineas Gage, don't you think

Thank you Janet - these look good. I will delve a little deeper and continue to be surprised. Grateful you took the time to gather these.

I learned something, too.